


Depending on Context

by abundantlyqueer



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-10-10
Updated: 2003-10-10
Packaged: 2017-10-13 01:17:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/131187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abundantlyqueer/pseuds/abundantlyqueer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Orli's refrigerator door is a masterpiece.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Depending on Context

**Author's Note:**

  * For [princessofg](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=princessofg).



Orli's refrigerator door is a masterpiece. Viggo's photographs, glued to mirrors and tucked between makeup jars and stashed in drawers and fluttering to trailer floors are art; Orli's refrigerator door is something more than that. The entire surface has grown thick layers of papers and post-its and pictures and ticket-stubs and brochures for adventure-sports centers and phone-numbers scribbled on grubby bits of paper-napkin and pages from the daily mini-scripts with various words crossed out and 'pants' written in. Brightly colored refrigerator magnets and splats of play-doh and suction-cupped rubber goldfish nestle beneath the curling papers like fruit waiting to be plucked. Variously colored Mylar hospital-bracelets hang like written offerings on a wishing tree, and every wish is 'Orlando Jacob Bloom 13 Jan 1977'. The refrigerator door-handles emerge out of the surf like sharks' fins, sharks' fins with shoelace bracelets that say things like 'I Survived Nevis Highway Bridge' tied around them.  
At two in the afternoon, Elijah is horribly hung-over and still reeking of alcohol and smoke and sweat. He scratches at his flattened thicket of dark hair until it stops feeling like an ill-fitting hat, and hitches his baggy pajama pants higher onto his hips. He has a scabby rust-red scrape on his chin, due to Orli's failure to adequately spot him as they climbed over the chain-link fence behind Astin's house last night. He is not, however, insecure. So maybe there's a kind of devil's feng shui, an ill-starred juxtaposition of Elijah and the refrigerator door and the scrap of heavily textured paper with a few words of Elvish hastily written in soft dark pencil. Next to the looping curling script, Orli has written the translation in speedy sloped block letters and scratchy black ballpoint.  
Arrows  
Direct  
Pierce  
Transfix  
What fletches do you choose  
I asked him  
Viggo has talked about the need to feel a poem and Elijah feels this one all right, feels it sour down his throat and acidic in his stomach and tells himself this isn't him, he doesn't do this stuff. He isn't insecure. Elijah can't help it if, in looking away from Viggo's poem, his eye falls on a photograph of Orli in mid bridge-leap, body arching in the air like a flying fish. A tiny pencil sketch expertly executed on a craft-services paper napkin, of Legolas with head bowed and hair falling in a heavy curtain half-obscuring his face. One of Orli's candy-colored Polaroid shots, capturing an early morning sky and, dark in the foreground, Aragorn's grayed silhouette. Elijah isn't insecure; he's just young and short and his bug-eyes are neon-blue against their bloodshot whites and his so-perfect pale skin is raw with stubble burns and sometimes Viggo and Orli will look at each other over Elijah's head and Elijah has an (often irresistible) urge to pogo up and down, intruding himself into the silent connection of their eyes. Elijah's not insecure, he's just a fuckin' geek.  
Do. Not. Do this.  
Elijah takes a deep breath, sets his jaw, and takes a single step back from the refrigerator. Orli's with Elijah, and Elijah's not going to insult Orli by thinking he'd go behind Elijah's back with anyone, even Viggo. And Viggo's a fuckin' prince among men, and Elijah's not going to insult him by imagining he'd make any kind of move on Orli when he knows Orli's with someone else. And if the hobbit has the Elf prince, and the rightful king of Gondor strikes out, well, go hobbit.  
Elijah notices the magnet holding Viggo's poem in place, a gift from Dom: over a grainy color shot of Legolas looking grimly determined, is printed in cheery hot-pink letters, Elves Do It For Ages.  
"Mnphuh," Orli says, dragging himself as far as the doorway and coming to rest against the doorframe.  
His eyes are still mostly closed; he's clawing at the itchy stubble breaking through on his scalp and jaw with one hand, while the other keeps safe-hold on the waistband of a pair of green-checkered shorts apparently built for someone twice his size. A long night of alcohol and smoke and deep-fried shrimp have turned his skin to mud.  
"You went away," Orli complains.  
"I know. I came back," Elijah grins, as much as his chapped lips will allow.


End file.
